By Bob Finlayson and Paul Brunato

Every marketer knows lead nurturing is essential to a successful demand generation program. But given the new B2B sales environment where buyers feel more overwhelmed than empowered, how do you nurture leads effectively? And how do you score them – realistically – so you can spend your valuable resources on the right leads? 

These are the questions we’ll tackle in this article. But first, a few definitions to make sure we’re all on the same page. 

Definitions are Important

We define lead nurturing as the process of building a relationship with potential customers by providing them with content that helps them understand a business challenge, and solve for that challenge (of course, the solution should involve your product or service). 

Today’s B2B buyers are sophisticated consumers of content. So your lead nurturing should evolve with the customers’ changing frame of reference, or “journey,” especially for complex, enterprise-grade products and services. 

Early in the customer’s journey, you should focus on educating and building trust; later in that journey you will guide them to your solution. Always keep the customer and their needs at the center of your lead nurturing activities.

Lead scoring is the process of assigning a value to each lead based on (1) their engagement with your content and touchpoints and (2) the overlap between their needs and your ability to meet those needs with your products or services. This second dimension is critical if you want to avoid wasting time on potential leads that are not a good match for your offering.

Benefits of Effective Nurturing and Scoring

Lead nurturing and scoring should be considered critical activities, given their significant benefits:

• Increased conversion rates

• Shortened sales cycles

• Improved resource allocation

• Increased ROI

When properly implemented, lead nurturing and scoring activities can be the deciding factor in the success or failure of a demand generation program. But the old ways of nurturing and scoring no longer work in the new B2B sales environment. 

New Lead Nurturing Strategies

The new lead nurturing strategies are based on the finding that B2B buyers are overwhelmed and unsure who to trust, while simultaneously wanting to be the masters of their own buying process. To meet the needs of these buyers, marketers must develop a deep understanding of their prospects and of the customer journey. 

Modern lead nurturing should leverage deep, data-driven insights into the customer persona – not just basic demographic and psychographic information, but their business needs, challenges, and opportunities – as seen through the lens of the seller's expertise and business goals. This last piece is central to identifying how the seller’s offering can help meet the buyer’s needs.

As we previously noted, early in the customer journey you should be educating and building trust. Not overtly selling. At this stage, it’s not about you and your solution; it’s about the buyer and their needs. The more you understand and directly address those needs, the more trust you will build with the buyer. 

In fact, early in the customer journey, during what we call the “motivation” stage, the buyer may not even know they have a need. But you know. You know based on your expertise with other buyers who have gone through the journey. You have insight the buyers lack. Providing guidance based on that insight builds trust, gratitude, and reliance. This early-stage nurturing during the motivation stage will pay off in the “consideration” and “purchase” stages of the customer journey, where overt selling begins in earnest.  

Basic lead nurturing tactics should be familiar to seasoned marketing professionals. We include them here, with new ideas for making them more effective for today’s selling environment:

Basic lead nurturing tactics should be familiar to seasoned marketing professionals. We include them here, with new ideas for making them more effective for today’s selling environment:

• Content: Crafting content that aligns with the customer journey is the key. As noted, early-stage content should focus on educating the prospect, rather than selling your solution. This builds the trust needed to lead the buyer along the customer journey. But the new buyer journey requires a new kind of content: interactive content that allows the buyer to take charge of the buying process during the consideration stage of their journey. We recommend interactive case studies and comparison tools, and even simple POCs that eliminate the need for interaction with a sales rep. Here again content should lean into the educational vs. sales ethos. Comparisons, for example, should be fact-based. Breaking trust with the buyer at the consideration stage will eliminate any sales opportunity. 

• Interactions: Multi-touch interactions are crucial to nurturing. And tracking tools are essential to understanding where the buyer is in their journey so that content served up through emails, social outreach, and retargeting ads matches their needs at every stage of their journey. Partnering with trade media outlets, analysts, and other influencers for the creation of comparison tools, educational webinars and events can be a powerful way to make your interactions more effective.

• Follow-up: This should go without saying, but rapid response to a prospect’s actions – such as registering for a webinar, downloading a whitepaper or engaging with an interactive comparison tool – will significantly boost conversion rates. AI tools make this very efficient, but beware generic responses that will elicit an eye roll from your prospect.

New Lead Scoring Strategies

Lead scoring is a systematic way of prioritizing your marketing and sales activities as they relate to specific leads. Traditionally, scoring was largely based on the number of interactions a prospect had with your content and other touch points. 

A more effective strategy is to weight scores according to engagement levels by targeted personas with content that most closely aligns with your product or solution. As a simple example, a prospect matching your customer persona who downloads a white paper on a business challenge that your product solves should be scored much higher than a random attendee of a webinar covering a range of topics, some of which are only tangential to your solution. 

Most B2B enterprise sellers use a marketing automation platform for nurturing and scoring. But you set the scoring parameters. Setting them properly is essential to success.  

Here are some basic factors to consider when lead scoring, with new ideas on how to improve them:

• Persona Matching: Your data-derived personas should identify the demographics representing your ideal buyer. At a minimum, this should include target job titles, job descriptions, industries, and company size. Attempting to score leads without customer personas – based on data, not hunches – is like bowling while blindfolded. You might get lucky, but chances are you’ll throw a gutter ball. 

• Behavioral Indicators: Typically this includes website visits, downloads of various content, signups for webinars and events, video views, etc. Predictive lead scoring software – with your careful creation of parameters based on your customer journey map and personas – can ensure correct scoring, followed by triggering of the appropriate response. 

• Engagement Indicators: This includes email opens, click-through rates, interactions with retargeting ads, and interactions with social media content. As with behavioral indicators, effective use of engagement indicators requires data-derived customer personas and customer journey maps.

Conclusion

Lead nurturing and scoring are central to an effective demand generation program. But they are only effective when they are built on a solid foundation of data and insight. 

In two previous articles we discussed:

• how the B2B buying landscape has changed, and what sellers need to do to align their content and activities to this new landscape, and

• why many demand generation programs fail, the three primary reasons behind those failures, and what to do to correct such issues.

In both articles we noted that data-driven customer personas and customer journey maps form the foundation on which a demand generation program should be built. Aligning your lead nurturing and scoring activities with your customer personas and customer journey maps will significantly improve the effectiveness of these activities. 

Next Steps

For more insights or for practical recommendations on how to improve your demand generation program, contact us directly or message us on LinkedIn at Bob Finlayson or Paul Brunato.